Harry F. Byrd

Harry Flood Byrd Sr. (10 June 1887-20 October 1966) was Governor of Virginia from 1 February 1926 to 15 January 1930 (succeeding Elbert Lee Trinkle and preceding John Garland Pollard) and a US Senator from 4 March 1933 to 10 November 1965 (succeeding Claude A. Swanson and preceding Harry F. Byrd Jr.). He was a prominent conservative Southern Democratic politician and political boss, famous for leading the "conservative coalition" in the US Congress and for opposing desegregation.

Biography
Harry Flood Byrd was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia in 1887, the son of delegate Richard Evelyn Byrd Sr.. He came from one of the First Families of Virginia and was a descendant of John Rolfe, Pocahontas, and William Byrd III, and he took over his father's newspaper, the Winchester Star, in 1903. He founded The Evening Journal in Martinsburg in 1907, and, in 1908, he became President of The Valley Turnpike Company. Byrd was also an apple grower, and he proudly stated that he paid his white and African-American workers the same. In 1915, he was elected to the State Senate, and he was a progressive who was interested in road developments. In 1925, he was elected Governor of Virginia, and he streamlined the state government, devolved property taxes to the counties while giving the state responsibility for the maintenance of county roads, called for state markers along the roads, added 2,000 miles to the state road system, and built up relationships with the courthouse cliques in the state, forming the "Byrd Organization" political machine. In 1933, he was elected to the US Senate, serving until 1965. Despite his progressive reforms as Governor, he never focused on education spending, and he became one of the most vocal proponents of retaining segregation, condemning Brown v. Board of Education and closing down schools rather than integrate them. Byrd also opposed the New Deal, but he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's internationalist foreign policy. During the 1950s, he voted against public works bills, including the interstate highway system. During the 1960 presidential election, Byrd received 15 electoral votes from faithless electors (all 8 of Mississippi's delegates, 6 from Alabama, and 1 from Oklahoma), with Alabama and Mississippi supporting a Byrd/Thurmond ticket and Oklahoma supporting a Byrd/Goldwater ticket. He resigned in 1965 due to health issues, and he died a year later at the age of 79.